Tuesday, June 2, 2015

Understanding Azure Premium Storage - Part 1

Azure Premium Storage is generally available in April of 2015. Some of you may try that in public preview period. In this part, I'm going to do some introductions for Azure Premium Storage and create a Premium Storage account on Microsoft Azure Portal.

Azure Premium Storage Disks can deliver high-performance, low-latency disk support for I/O intensive workloads running on Azure virtual machines. It can provide maximum 64,000 IOPS per VM but you need to understand the disk bandwidth for VM size. I'm going to talk about Max Disk bandwidth later. Azure Premium Storage Disks are pools of Solid State Disks. At this moment, there are some important thins you need to know.

Premium Storage Disks are under Premium Storage Accounts only

Premium Storage is currently available in the Microsoft Azure Preview Portal (new portal), Azure PowerShell 0.8.10 or later, Storage REST APi 2014-02-14 or later and Service Management REST API

Premium Storage is currently available in the following regions: Southeast Asia, East US 2, West US, West Europe and Japan West (Based on 2, June, 2015)

Premium Storage supports only Azure page blogs, which are used to hold persistent disk for Azure Virtual Machines (VMs)

A Premium Storage account is locally redundant (LRS) and keeps three copies of the data with in a single region.

If you want to use a Premium Storage account for your VM disks, you need to use the DS-series of VMs. You can use both Standard and Premium storage disks with DS-series of VMs but you cannot use Premium Storage disks with non-DS-serise of VMs.

A premium storage account cannot be mapped to a custom domain name.

Storage analytics is not currently supported for Premium Storage. To analyse the performance metrics of VMs using disks on Premium Storage accounts, use the operating system based tools, such as Windows Performance Monitor for Windows VMs and IOSTAT for Linux VMs.

2 comments:

You have mentioned that Premium storage is available in Sourth Central US data center. But even with the new azure portal, i am unable to select SCUS with premium storage. Other blogs like: http://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/pricing/details/storage/ mentions that premium storage is unavailable in SCUS.